Jail, dad and Bhagat Singh’s pen

Lalit Mohan

The Public Safety Act, the law under which Farooq Abdullah and other Kashmir politicians have been jailed, is a successor to a 200-year-old colonial era enactment. This Act, as well as its precursor, the Bengal Regulation III of 1818, both authorised the state to keep people in detention without giving any reason for doing so. This is a situation my father Virendra, too, faced 88 years ago.

Two weeks earlier, he had been released from his fourth detention and was at that moment a few months away from his BA final examination. Unlike Farooq, who has been a chief minister, is currently a member of the Lok Sabha and has often been India’s standard bearer in international forums, my father was a mere college student. Unfortunately, his track record was not very helpful and he was a marked man.

But even he was surprised when on February 10, 1931, Khan Bahadur Sayyed Ahmed Khan, an officer of Punjab Police, came to his house and informed him that he was to be locked up in Central Jail, Lahore, under Regulation III. People could be arrested even though, as the law stated, ‘there may not be sufficient ground to institute any judicial proceeding, or when such proceeding may not be adapted to the nature of the case...’ Mere suspicion of criminal intent was reason enough to detain any person.

A couple of weeks after he entered the jail, Bhagat Singh and his comrades were hanged in another wing of the same compound. My father was coincidentally the only member of that band of rebels to be lodged in some proximity to the three condemned men. He and his co-prisoner, Fazal Ilahi, used the services of the prison barber to get from Bhagat Singh his last mementos — a pen and his comb — shortly before he was marched to the gallows. Also, priceless was the account they coaxed the next day out of the Chief Prison Warder, Charat Singh, of how the revolutionary had conducted himself just before he mounted the platform.

In view of the indefinite duration of his ‘residence’ in Lahore Central Jail, my father prepared himself mentally to not ever graduate, which made him sad. But his sire, Mahashay Krishna, found it unacceptable that his son should miss his BA examination. He moved heaven and earth and finally secured permission for him to appear for the test at a special one-man centre.

So one day, a prison staffer armed with pen, pencil, notebooks and books arrived in his cell with a message that his vacation was over and now he had to study. When the time came for him to sit for the test, a room in the railway police lockup was designated as his examination centre, where a prison van would take him back and forth for each paper. He did pass and earn his degree.

After over six months behind bars, he was released as unceremoniously as he was taken in. But he could never quite figure out why he had been incarcerated without any specific charge, except that this was how colonial rulers often treated their subjects.